"What was it like to be a first-century Galilean...In trying to imagine
Jesus' experience - and in trying to understand how his became a story told
against Judaism instead of within Judaism - there is a key element yet to be
considered. It is the most important element, yet it is also one often left
aside. To tell the story of Christian origins (or the origins, for that
matter, of rabbinic Judaism) without reference to it is equivalent to
telling the story of the 1916 Irish Rising without reference to the Great
War. And war - war every bit as savage, in relative terms, as World War I -
is the missing element... The origins of the Jesus movement, and ultimately
of Christianity, cannot be understood apart form the century-long Roman war
against the Jews, albeit a war punctuated by repeated acts of Jewish
rebellion. That is the social and political context that is all too often
missing from the memory: Jesus and his movement were born in the shadow of
what would stand as the most grievous violence against the Jewish people
until Hitler's attempt at a Final Solution."

Carroll goes on to provide the reader with Jewish population estimates and
casualties that can even impact one's perspective of the current
Israeli-Arab conflict. For it is rare to find so vivid a description of
Palestine (the Roman name for Israel) under the Second Commonwealth (the
Second Holy Temple). There are, actually, many parts of this book that can
be incorporated into a curriculum for high school Sunday school and after
school programs, for focus groups on college campuses as well as for adult
study.

"Between half a million and a million Jews lived in Palestine at the time of
Jesusí birth. Some scholars put the Jewish population there as high as two
and a half million, with a few hundred thousand Gentiles. . Sanders (a
well-known authority on the subject)...accepts a figure of 'less than a
million, possible only about half that.; Later we will see that Josephus
posits Jewish casualty figures in the war with Rome that Sanders finds too
high. Whatever the totals, the ratio of Jewish dead in Palestine at the
hands of Rome may well approximate the twentieth-century record of one in
three."

Here is the description of the book as it appears on the inside jacket -
notes prepared by the books publisher, Houghton Mifflin.

" In a bold and moving book that is sure to spark heated debate, the
novelist and cultural critic James Carroll maps the profoundly troubling
two-thousand-year course of the Church's battle against Judaism and faces
the crisis of faith it has provoked in his own life as a Catholic. More than
a chronicle of religion, this dark history is the central tragedy of Western
civilization, its fault lines reaching deep into our culture.

The Church's failure to protest the Holocaust - the infamous "silence" of
Pius Xii - is only part of the story: the death camps, Carroll shows, are a
culmination of the long, entrenched tradition of anti-Judaism. From Gospel
accounts of the crucifixion of Jesus, to Constantine's transformation of the
cross into a sword, to the rise of blood libels, scapegoating, and modern
anti-Semitism, Carroll reconstructs the dramatic story of the Church's
conflict not only with Jews but with itself. Yet in tracing the arc of this
history, he affirms that it did not necessarily have to be so. There were
roads not taken, heroes forgotten; new roads can be taken yet. Demanding
that the Church finally face this past in full, Carroll calls for a
fundamental rethinking of the deepest questions of Christian faith. Only
then can Christians, Jews and all who carry the burden of this history
begin to gorge a new future."

Here is another excerpt that should be read carefully and critically:

"The phrase 'New Covenant', which has come to define Christianity's status
as the superseding religion, has its origin, in fact, in Jeremiah, but the
Hebrew word that prophet used carried exactly this connotation of renewal, a
notion that does not open into the deadly dichotomy between new and old. For
Jeremiah, and for Jesus, there was only one covenant. So we are not talking
here about Judaism's being brought to fulfillment in the discontinuous
message of a different movement. The point, again, is that Jesus offers a
Jewish renewal, and it is tied to love. The point, again, is that Jesus
offers a Jewish renewal, and it is tied to love. Jesus' message was thus
rooted not only, say in the opening chapters of Genesis, but in the piety of
Judaism as such. I read it as a Christian, yet the record of the Torah seem
clear; before God gave commandments, God gave blessings. Before the Law,
there was the rescue from Egypt. Hosea, Isaiah, and other prophets strike
the theme repeatedly; If Israel behaves like a faithless wife, sometimes
provoking god's rage, God nevertheless takes her back every time. Nothing
Israel does can undo this love.

Jewish hope has everything to do with the faith that "the G-d (Judaism.com's
spelling) of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob" does not break the covenant with
Jews when they die. not even human mortality outweigh the love of G-d. Thus
G-d does not need to be appeased like some puny clay idol, nor does G-d's
grace need to be earned. Despite a two-millennia-long exploitation of the
crassest stereotypes, the Jewish G-d is no garment-district bargainer
shuffling dress racks, looking among his creatures for the ones who offer
wholesale. No. Again, I say this is a Christian's reading, but the tradition
is clear; The Jewish G-d's attitude is one of love. Period.

You would not know that if all you had to go on was the Church - not only in
its preaching but in customary readings of its foundational documents, the
Gospels and Epistles of Paul."

Such is how much of the book proceeds, with Carroll systematically refuting
the underpinnings of the Church of Paul, and then showing how generations
upon generations of the church relying upon spin over reality, the Church
had to become anti-Semitic to continually justify its perpetuation.More Information About "Constantine's Sword", By James Carroll...

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